


Greenhouse

by telekinesiskid



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Aesthetic Porn, M/M, a romantic evening of weeding and bonfires, toxic plant boy Adam Parrish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-04 03:52:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6640312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid/pseuds/telekinesiskid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were as lush and inviting as anything, more fatal than the manmade chemicals under his sink. Adam released a ragged, exasperated breath and the bushes trembled with him; they reached out to him a little bit more, made his life that little bit worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Greenhouse

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Overgrown](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6457693) by [kiiouex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex). 



> because............... I just can't stop thinking about toxic plant boy Adam Parrish .-. alt. title is "don't you know that you're toxic~ ;)"
> 
> beta'd by the lovely lovely [kiiouex](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex)!! she wrote the original toxic plant boy AU so ye - go read that too ;o
> 
> edit: if u want an idea of what ronan's ensemble looks like, check out the draw I did over [here](http://tkscribbles.tumblr.com/post/148020128282/i-call-this-one-draw-ur-own-damn-fanart)

Ronan looked like something out of a low-budget punk-aesthetic post-apocalyptic film. He was still in his black muscle tee and black jeans, sporting unlaced boots and chewed-up leather bracelets. But his hands were coated in the sickly neon yellow of heavy duty rubber gloves, his face almost completely obscured by blue-rimmed safety googles and a low-cost dust mask. Adam had asked him to wear one of his spare work coveralls, but Ronan had refused – as if he wouldn’t look any more strange and outlandish than he already did. At least he’d be safer. Right now, as he was, with his arms and neck still bare, his improv hazmat suit was incomplete.  _Arrogance_ , Adam thought, and there wasn’t any heat behind it, but there wasn’t any admiration to it either. Like the older men who came to work with vicious sunburns because they wouldn’t deign to put on sunblock. Like death wouldn’t find them, even when they lay directly in its path. Machoism and bravado and arrogance.

Adam stood by in his usual khakis and a plain shirt. He didn’t need any protection gear; _this_ was technically his protection – all these plants. He could swallow any number of berries or leaves or roots or seeds or flowers in this room and he’d only be left with the deceptively sweet aftertaste in his mouth. No internal burns, no abrupt organ failure, no excruciating death.

He peered around his flat. Ronan seemed to have made more headway than he had in the short time that he’d been here; substantial chunks of the bristling greenery had been removed, and sat by the door were two twin black plastic trash bags, sweltering with a fusion of pretty toxins. Adam couldn’t even tell where most of these plants had  _come_ from, until he cleared away clumps of wolfsbane or shrubs of hemlock and found their roots like cords. Coming through cracks in the walls, gaps in the skirting, up from the drains, dripping from power sockets. He wrapped his hand around as many as he could and – with a tender, guilt-ridden force – he uprooted them, chucked them into the half-filled trash bag at his feet. He had been doing this for the past thirty minutes, Ronan only the past ten. It had seemed impossible at first, when he’d woken from a nightmare, nestled in his own little garden of poisons. But now, with Ronan here, Adam thought they could have it all cleaned out within another twenty minutes.

He held in his palm a little sprout that he’d picked from a pin-hole in the wall. It curled in his hand, craning up, like his face was the sun. _Cabeswater loves me,_ he thought.

But sometimes it was hard to love Cabeswater back.

Ronan exhaled loudly from beside Adam’s desk, where he’d been wrestling with a particularly thick creeper – Adam noted he looked like the bizarre offspring of a gardener and a demolition man – and, once pulled free, he binned it with little ceremony. Adam warily paused to watch Ronan put his hand on the wall and lean his weight into it, like he needed rest, like he needed air.

Adam said, “We can stop if you feel light-headed.”

Ronan shook his head; turning back, he fixed Adam with a look Adam could barely interpret with his face obscured by the safety glasses, the mask. He’d only been there ten minutes but already there was a thin sheen on sweat on his forehead; Adam had no way to tell if it was just a by-product of intensive work or if it was a symptom of a plant that was slowly killing him. “I’m fine, Parrish,” he said, muffled. “I haven’t collapsed yet, have I?”

Ronan returned to work while Adam’s hands worried at the rim of his plastic bag. Adam didn’t know what to make of the fact that Ronan could equate  _fine_ with  _still standing._ It made him uneasy, and yet he knew that he himself abided by the exact same laws. Arrogance. Weakness. Fear.

The greenery in the room shifted.

Adam tried to pick up the slack. They hadn’t spoken yet, save for their very brief and very stilted phone conversation. “Normally I wouldn’t ask, but…” His eyes flicked up to Ronan; he was being ignored. But Ronan didn’t think of it as ignoring – just listening without acknowledgment. “I was told there would be an inspection in a few hours, so… I need these plants gone, before they can hurt anyone.”

Ronan didn’t respond, which made the explanation feel redundant. Ronan didn’t need an explanation; less than an hour ago, on a Saturday afternoon, Adam had called – just as miraculous, Ronan had picked up – to ask for his help, and Ronan had lent it without question. It made Adam wish that he could just reach out and ask for help more often – not just in life-or-death situations, but when it’s just  _hard,_ and he could really use someone to just look at him and feel his pain. To make it real.

“Also I’m sure there’s a limit to how many plants you can keep in these flats,” Adam finished lamely, and the corners of his eyes crinkled up, like he was smirking.

“You’ve grown your own Garden of Eden,” he murmured and Adam smirked a little bit, too.

Adam looked over, half on his way to a bad joke; instead his breath caught and he snapped,  _“Ronan!”_

Ronan looked up, eyes wide and startled, until he realised what he’d done. “Shit,” he muttered and dropped his gloved hand from where he’d absently attempted to scratch the bare skin of his forearm. He stared at it as if it might sting. “Shit,” he said again.

_“Cover your skin,”_ Adam yelled, out of frustration, his poorly masked fear. Between blinks, the two of them watched the patch on Ronan’s pale skin redden. It looked as irritated as Ronan did. He moved his arm sharply by his side as if he could just shake the itch from it. Before it could be tempered, the fear taking over Adam peaked and he cried, “For Christ’s  _sake_ , Lynch!”

“It’s a goddamn greenhouse in here, Parrish!” Ronan yelled back, arms hovering unnaturally by his sides. Adam couldn’t look away from the starkly angry mark on his skin; it reminded him of a severe sunburn he’d once had as a child that took weeks to cool off and peel away. But it wasn’t a sunburn – it was a bad rash. It wasn’t the sun that had done this – it was Adam.

“Just  _stop worrying,_ alright?” Ronan said. “You’re as bad as Gansey.”

Adam closed his mouth, frown deepening. It didn’t seem fair. Someone had to say Gansey’s lines if Gansey wasn’t there to say them himself.

“I don’t think you realise just how lethalthese plants are, Lynch.  _This—_ ” With his bare hands, Adam picked a sprig of deceitfully innocuous leaves and little bell-shaped smoky flowers. He held it out for Ronan to see and Ronan paused to look at it. “ _This_ is belladonna. Ingesting just  _one_ of these leaves can kill you. Even just  _touching it_  can give you pustules.”

He let that hang heavy in the air for a few long seconds: how close Ronan was to an abrupt and agonising death. Ronan stared at the belladonna as if it were the little bit of decorative parsley topping his plate at a restaurant. “Well.” Ronan pinched the sprig from Adam’s palm and tossed it into his trash bag, with every other poisonous plant known to man. He looked up to flash Adam a lazy –  _arrogant_ – smile. “Let’s throw it out, then.”

Ronan moved away without another word; he abandoned the various creepers and vines coming up from behind Adam’s desk to work on the vibrantly green plants that had grown up from the sink. Adam felt his face darken. He thought,  _I shouldn’t have asked for his help,_ and every inch of his pride bruised beautifully.

The leaves around him shivered. Something in Adam snapped; his productivity drastically increased. He uprooted plants by the handful and shoved them in the trash bag, noisy and rigorous, ruthlessly driven out of spite and everything else he couldn’t name. _Let’s throw them out, then,_ he kept thinking.

After about a minute or two, Ronan stopped. Out of the corner of his eye, Adam watched Ronan almost run an arm across his forehead, think better of it and stop. His arms swung – the swatch of red skin still smarted – by his sides and he shook his head back and forth, slow and steady. “…Okay,  _now_ I’m light-headed,” he said, dropping the trash bag. He crossed the room in three fluid strides to stand at an open window, already cracked as wide as Adam could get it, but Ronan persuaded it to open a little bit further. He fumbled down the dust mask with one gloved hand and took in deep breaths from the cool outside air. _“Christ,_ Parrish. Y’know you can’t ever let the government know about you; they’d fucking weaponize you.”

“I  _am_ a weapon,” Adam muttered, still wringing plants by their thin necks and wrenching them from their homes.

Ronan scoffed from the window. “No you’re not.”

Whether Ronan had meant it or not, Adam heard it as _you’re being stupid._ It sounded like provocation, an invitation to bicker, but Adam just shook his head, determined to clear the rest of the plants out himself, masochistically burning through fuel he knows he ought to preserve for work in a couple of hours. He cast a sullen look over his shoulder to see that Ronan was staring at him, softly confused.

“Look, you’ll… you’ll get this under control,” Ronan said, a fumbling attempt at consolation. “You’re the magician.”

“Yeah,” Adam sighed, unconvinced, and Ronan’s head titled. Adam’s ear pricked; behind him, he could hear the leaves whisper. He could feel an all-too-familiar pressure building behind his eyes, pressing like a boot on his throat. The words slipped out before Adam could stop them: “What’s my miracle again? Oh—that’s right—I’m a harbinger of skin rashes and respiratory shutdown and _death_ _.”_

“Take a break, Parrish,” Ronan said, and Adam threw him an absolutely insulted look. “I’m serious. Your bad vibes are fucking up the place.” He waved one hand at the room, his narrowed eyes focused somewhere just over the top of Adam’s head. “You’re growing plants faster than you can weed them.”

Adam looked behind him. It was true; the section he’d cleared out not even ten minutes ago was now overgrown with fresh, competing brushes of snakeroot, larkspur, henbane, castor bean, elderberry, corn lily – too many plants to name, too little distinctions between them, too far from their natural habitats to feasibly thrive, yet there they all were. They were as lush and inviting as anything, more fatal than the manmade chemicals under his sink. Adam released a ragged, exasperated breath and the bushes trembled with him; they reached out to him a little bit more, made his life that little bit worse.

He breathed,  _“Fuck,”_ and threw down the trash bag. Petals and leaves and seeds spilled out, but Adam didn’t care; he drove the heels of his palms into his eyes until they ached, keeping the tears in. A barrage of thoughts ran wild:  _I don’t have time for this, I have work soon, what’s the point, they’re just going to grow back, I’m so tired, why is Cabeswater doing this to me, can I get time off work? (no) Is Ronan’s arm okay? (I don’t know) Can I walk into work without slowly killing everyone? (I don’t know)—_

He started at Ronan’s hand on his back; he hadn’t heard him walk over. Adam tried to take it for what it was: an offer of comfort, of validation. It would’ve meant a lot more if it wasn’t just the scrub of rubber against cloth.

“I hate this,” he admitted, and he felt Ronan press in a little closer. He swallowed with no consequence; the lump in his throat didn’t go away, didn’t make him want to cry any less. There were so many things he hated about this; he couldn’t pinpoint it to just one. He tried to take it apart, to dismantle his broken inner workings, to untangle his feelings. He hated that he’d wasted both his own and Ronan’s time – that his rampant pruning couldn’t keep up with the regrowth, duping him into the comforting illusion of progress. He hated that he had to leave for work in a couple of hours, that he had three separate research reports due in a week, that as much as he wanted to hold Ronan he couldn’t, because Ronan was too goddamn stubborn to cover up. He wanted to cry, but he was well versed in the feeling of never getting what he wanted.

He took his hands away from his face. The inside of his throat felt raw, unravelled. He couldn’t decide if having Ronan there with him made any of that better or worse or didn’t make a difference at all. Machoism, bravado – Adam was bad at imitating them, but he could never seem to stop trying.

The greenery shimmied in the hot, breezeless air. Every plant that surrounded him spelt death but they all looked so lush, so safe to touch. Berries like little red rubies, pulpy and juicy, ready to pick off the branches and slip into your mouth. Flowers that looked as innocuous as daisies. The air was permeated with an ever-sweet scent, tainted here and there with a smell like rotting flesh. Hideous death and painful beauty, all in one place, all for him.

Adam breathed. Ronan’s hand moved lazily over the back of his shirt, the patterns traced there not entirely directionless – it was Latin, of course, but Adam couldn’t translate it. It occurred to Adam that the more time he lamented wasting, the more time he wasted, and he turned around to face Ronan. “You can leave if you want,” he said. It wasn’t pointed – just an option – but Ronan shook his head anyway. Something about the startling sincerity of his face wordlessly told Adam that there wasno other option.

They both resumed their work. It took much longer than the twenty minutes Adam had predicted before, when the plants had still moved in a predictable fashion. Adam stuffed his emotions away as savagely as he stuffed the new crops of toxicity into the trash. He focused; he narrowed his existence down to a singular task, and that task was not letting Cabeswater isolate him from his friends and loved ones. He blotted out everything else until every last plant was binned, until all that remained was a sparse carpet of green and the scent of freshly cut grass. He swept up the rest and, when his flat finally looked clean – at least clean enough to pass an inspection – he firmly tied and knotted the last trash bag. He set it by the others, ready for disposal.

He took a small breather while Ronan drank from the faucet. He looked at his hands. Despite handling toxins so lethal they’d eat into his skin, they were completely unspoiled. A little red, maybe – from wrestling with vines as thick as rope – but the redness wouldn’t last more than a few hours. He looked at Ronan, whose arm occasionally jerked as if he were still resisting the urge to scratch the mark that trailed up his skin. For a hazy moment, Adam thought about kissing it – a wordless apology – but he knew that that would only make it worse. He wasn’t a very safe person to breathe the same air with, let alone bump noses and brush lips and share saliva.

Ronan shut off the water, wiped his mouth on his unscathed arm, and turned to face Adam. His safety glasses were clipped over the front of his tee, and his dust mask hung from his neck like an eccentric necklace only Blue would consider sporting. “So,” he said, shrugging. “What happens now? Are we taking these to the dump?”

“I was thinking we could burn them,” Adam said.

“Plastic and all?”

Adam nodded once. “Plastic and all.”

They took the bagged plants down in turns, two at a time. They brushed off any odd looks from pedestrians and quiet church-goers as they loaded up the bags –  _stuffed,_ Adam thought,was perhaps a more accurate term than  _loaded_ – into the boot and backseats of the Hondayota. Ronan climbed into the passenger side as Adam slipped behind the wheel, and, after a few failed start-ups, the car puttered to life and took to the road. The very first thing Ronan did was play the mixtape he’d made for Adam, several notches too loud.

Adam drove them both as far out of town as his limited free time would allow. Away from civilisation – away from tar-sealed roads and slanted tin letterboxes and grazing livestock – to the dusty open fields that preceded thick, impenetrable woods. It had almost been ten minutes without another vehicle in sight when Adam took his car off-road and parked it in a paddock that was more dirt than dry grass.

Ronan climbed out first; he seemed to already know what to do and what to look for. As Adam slugged the trash bags out of the car, he saw Ronan rummage by the forest’s edge, tossing over his shoulder rocks and twigs, broken branches and browned bracken – anything the ground allowed him to take. Adam picked out a spot nearby: a patch of earth where nothing seemed to grow. He started to dig a shallow pit for the bonfire.

They worked together, quick and efficient and silent. Adam made a large circle with the rocks Ronan brought him, and everything else dry and flammable went into the centre of it. Bag after bag was tossed into the circle. Adam didn’t know if it counted as proper and safe disposal of toxic plant life but at least, out there, too far from the town for people to just happen upon, there was little for the poisonous plants to destroy.

Adam turned the box of matches in his hand. Such an anomaly – however accidental – he could never share with the world. _Magician,_ he thought.

He felt Ronan’s eyes on him and he turned to stare right back. There wasn’t really a smile on Ronan’s face so much as the absence of a frown. His eyes glinted like there was something just a little bit admirable about all of this, about all of Adam Parrish.

“You should stand back,” Adam advised and Ronan, obligingly, took a single step back. “Further,” he said, and waited until Ronan was a decent distance away.

He took out a match, struck it down the side with ease. He hesitated for one moment and a moment more before he let it fall onto the pile. He lit another match and dropped it, and another, and another, until several small flames licked into one, eating into all it touched. Twigs and leaves blackened and curled, popping and cracking. The plastic crumpled as it burned and started to melt; a breeze fanned the fire and blew up a foul, smoky smell with it that made Adam’s eyes water. He covered his nose and walked back.

He went to stand with Ronan, who was leant casually against the Hondayota’s side. For a while, they just stood in a comfortable silence and watched the fire thrive from afar. In another world, it was almost romantic. Adam could feel Ronan restlessly shift beside him – could feel the heat radiate from his body, could hear the way his throat stuck when he swallowed, could see his pulse pound too-fast on his neck. Part of Adam wanted to lean into it; part of him wanted to keep his toxic skin as far away from Ronan as he could.

“Thanks for this,” Adam murmured, eyes not leaving the bonfire. “I appreciate it.”

There was a pause. Then, hand still gloved, Ronan reached over and twined his rubbery fingers with Adam’s.

 

**Author's Note:**

> feel free to chat with me over at [tumblr](http://telekinesiskid.tumblr.com/) ;o


End file.
